Capturing Pat Buchanan

On the dust jacket of Timothy Stanley’s The Crusader: The Life and Tumultuous Times of Pat Buchanan, Paul Gottfried offers this “Advance Praise”: “Stanley’s biography of Pat Buchanan combines meticulous research, including the fruits of multiple interviews, with highly accessible prose and judicious judgments.” The sheer heft of this 455-page volume, the first full-length biography of the journalist, commentator, assistant to two presidents, and three-time presidential candidate, seems almost enough to confirm at least the first part of Professor Gottfried’s assessment. The few paragraphs in the book that do not have at least one endnote are mainly composed of one sentence. Taken together, those notes fill 53 pages, followed by a 7-page Bibliography.